“Christ carried a scroll.” Felon’s mind whirled around the thought.
“And as the seals are broken they are law.” Dead hands smoothed water into algae colored hair. “And great perils fall on the earth.”
“War. Plagues, earthquakes,” Felon said the words without purpose. His body was shaking with returning vigor. “The Horsemen.”
“And the Angels enact these changes.” The Swimmer kicked his feet in the water. “You see now?”
“Change doesn’t fit.” The assassin knew his fingers could pull a trigger. The knowledge put new vigor in him.
“True.” The Swimmer snarled or smiled. “The Change is not that which was revealed.”
“So?” Felon’s nerves had steadied. His legs still felt like wet sand, but his shoulders and arms itched for murder.
“You see what Balg spoke about.” Anticipation filled the Swimmer’s dead face. “What we heard in the darkness. Why we brought you here.”
“Betrayal.” The assassin’s face flushed with feeling. He saw some sticks of driftwood, put them on the fire.
“Balg spoke to them.” The Swimmer smiled. “But brave Michael guarded the way as before. He is God’s arm and sword.”
Felon searched his memory. There was something.
“…the Principalities shall be as one,” the swimmer said, and coughed. “Man shall be set beside God, equal to Angels.”
“Gabriel didn’t like that,” Felon finished. “Balg wants?”
“He who judges will cast Balg out when the seals are broken.” The Swimmer smiled to himself.
“Judgment Day…” Felon dropped his gaze. His fingers tingled, but their color had returned. “Who judges?”
“The Shepherd. The Lamb of Seven Horns.” The Swimmer sank beneath the water, resurfaced.
“I kill Michael, so the seals won’t be broken.” Felon thought of the walking dead and the Change. “Gabriel is the Angel of Death.” The assassin identified one of his enemies. Uriel guarded the gates of Eden. “Raphael?” Felon remembered the other Archangel’s name.
“None know.” The Swimmer submerged again—came up hair pasted to his head.
“Their own Apocalypse.” Felon looked mournfully at his cigarettes.
“Just so. You are as we expected.” The Swimmer gestured to his sunken comrades. “We knew this.”
“What do you want?” Felon crouched over the flames now.
“We brought you here so that you could act.” The other corpses floated forward. Their unblinking eyes gleamed with firelight.
“Act?” Felon’s stomach rumbled. He had not eaten at Lucky’s.
“As you must.” The Swimmer crawled out of the water toward him. “As you were made.”
“How did you find me?” Felon cast an eye to the doorway behind him. He could see the first step in a series that led upward.
“We watch. We listen.” The Swimmer’s body grated against the sand. “They spoke of you. We heard it. We know the waterways beneath the City. We are many. We waited.” The Swimmer paused. “Those who spoke of you saw your companions.”
“Who?” The assassin coiled for action. The Swimmer’s shoulders were powerful—his skin like marble.
“Your enemies.” The Swimmer looked back to his companions. “Those who set you on this path.”
“Riddles!” With returning vigor, his ire flared.
“There is no riddle.” The corpse moved closer. “There is nothing that will happen that you do not expect. That we do not expect.”
Felon grabbed his gun, got to his feet.
The Swimmer gazed at him. Its face softened. “There are some among us, that have nothing. They float. They are dead, and not dead. We care for them. But they scream.”
“So.” Felon had nothing for the Swimmer.
“So do what you were created to do. Do what you want to do. Do what you are expected to do.” The Swimmer’s eyes warmed a moment. Something resembling life filled them. “Kill them, as you desire. Vengeance is thine. That is what we want. That is no riddle.”
The assassin picked up his sodden coat and jacket.
“We wish to die.” The Swimmer looked to his companions. “There is but one way.”
Felon hated the piteous looks that hung on the Swimmers’ dead faces. One by one, they floated free of the water.
“Kill,” the Swimmer said and raised a hand toward the doorway. “Stairs lead up to a street that will take you to the harbor. A boat is there that will return to the Sunken City. If you miss it, you will take another.” The creature turned, slithered toward the water and the waiting Swimmers.
Felon’s shoulders clenched against a chill. The gun trembled in his grip. He turned away from the Swimmers and hurried up the steps as quickly as his numb legs would allow.
68 – Redeemer
Dawn wept as Nursie carried her down a corridor that ran at right angles to the main hall. The monster accessed the passage through a doorway that was set in the wall a short distance from the room of experiments. It was invisible until a couple of points on the wall responded to slight pressure from the monster’s fingertips.
Nursie was wearing her human skin again, slipping it on after sucking the Doctor’s body clean of fluids. Now she hummed worriedly to herself as though her recent excesses with the Doctor and the First-mother had gone far beyond rules she was previously forced to observe.
“No angry, yah!” she said through the monstrous music and throaty rumbling that came from deep within her chest. “Sad baby child!”
Dawn wished Nursie would stop pretending to be human because it just croaked up the smell of blood and death. When she wept, the monster’s maternal instincts came closer to the surface.
“She no cry now,” said Nursie shortly after re-growing her skin. “Ist sad kid, no?” And the thing pulled Dawn up into the crook of her neck cooing and rubbing her back with an oversized hand while she swayed rhythmically and hummed a long forgotten song.
Impossibly, Dawn smelled a floral perfume in amongst the stench of body odor, rotten milk and blood. It reminded her of an expression Mr. Jay used when they came upon a group of old dead women masking their condition with lots of cosmetics. “An overabundance of toiletries,” he said, pinching his nose impishly after they passed. “Heavy on the toilet!” The thought of him brought a tortured smile to her lips and more tears. That only encouraged more consolation from Nursie.
“Nursie hates to see she sad—First-mother child weeps,” the monster consoled, pausing at a wide iron door and working a heavy handle to open it. The rusted plate slid back to reveal a dark opening from which a foul stench wafted. It was rot and feces—damp and mildew—and only made Dawn think of dark things and death.
The forever girl broke from her sorrow long enough to notice that Nursie had shed her human skin once again, and was proceeding with a powerful shuffling gait; her claw-like feet gripping the floor. As they entered the new darkness an orange illumination came up like lit shadows and gave Dawn an unwelcome look at her captor’s blood-slicked cheeks and a shadowy first vision of her new confines.
The room was enormous but narrow, like it was wedged in the gargantuan cleft or valley between two mountainous stone walls. The floor was made of fibrous webbing that gave a jouncing platform for the monster to cross.
“Home and the heart,” chortled Nursie as she held Dawn close to her neck with one hand and started to climb long woven sheets of fibrous material into the upper shadows. “Casa e cuore.”
She hummed and chuckled as she gained greater height and Dawn was sickened by the need to cling tightly to Nursie’s ugly neck.
“Poor bambino, fussing,” Nursie croaked as she climbed pausing at intervals to check on her burden and give a reassuring pat. “First madre loves Nursie, sì?”
Against the pitch black, Dawn could see the gigantic cavern was a patchwork of fibers and woven platforms. The whole construction swayed and rocked under Nursie’s weight. The action caused much movement and swaying, and it was then
that the dim light glinted on something that made Dawn cry out.
Glistening shapes were woven into the structure for support, for handgrips and foot rungs, small things easily overlooked at first. Except that the webbing bound some together, and articulated them, gave them the semblance of life. Bones, and parts of skeletons bound together by fabric and fiber—small, all children, were bound up in the webbing, the flesh missing—in places dried and wriggling with the Change’s weird reanimation.
Dawn wept anew and pressed her eyes into Nursie’s neck. There were thousands of bones all around, hanging and dangling throughout the structures. Beneath them far below, Dawn chanced a look and saw a wriggling mat of the yellowed bones and skeletonized bodies, twitching and moving from wall to wall in a nightmarish scene.
“Der, there,” consoled Nursie. “Erste Mutter need milk, yah?” And the monster surmounted a broad platform. She muttered something and from a couple of points in the air over them, a red illumination grew to give light.
“She-em der cold?” Nursie asked, holding Dawn out—swinging her by the armpits. “Or ist she-em hunger—yah? She hungry!”
Nursie’s monstrous eyes looked down at her long, slick chest and one claw-like hand ran over the nipples there—ugly yellow milk sprayed from each gorged teat it touched.
Dawn followed the gesture and her stomach turned at the sight of the apple-sized spigots of flesh.
“Or she needs slaap?” Nursie whispered, gesturing down and to her left, “Sleep like ragazzi.”
Dawn followed the look and screamed when she saw the boys Nursie took from the Dormitory. Both were asleep—or drugged—and tangled or bound in the fibrous cord that comprised Nursie’s home. Their bondage did not horrify Dawn so much as their condition. One of the boy’s legs had been chewed down to the bone. Living muscle, naked, curled and flexed as the boy slept. The other’s stomach was distended and moved like it was full of giant worms.
“No!” she screamed, and started pushing and slapping at the monstrosity that held her. Her little fists beat quietly against the massive face and chest. But the action only excited the monster, as murky milk started spurting from the monstrous nipples.
“Fussy! Fussy mother…” Nursie cooed and chuckled. “Special ragazza, this girl.” And she squatted then reclined against the fibrous material. She rolled on her side. The dribbling nipples sprayed the dank air. “Drink! Drink!” With a powerful hand, she grabbed Dawn and turned her face toward the teats. “Den slaap and dream. She-em eat?”
Dawn fought and struggled against the monster’s powerful hands—the milk sprayed toward her face and she strained to keep her mouth away.
And then a voice cut the scene: “Lillake!”
Nursie’s eyes burned fiercely, and her long neck swept up like a serpent’s.
“Let her go!” the voice continued, and Dawn’s heart leapt because she knew it was Mr. Jay! She knew the voice so well, had been praying to hear it for so long.
Nursie roared and lurched to her full height, claws embedded in the fabric of her nest. She clutched Dawn to her reeking chest. “Nein. It Nursie’s time!” The monster held Dawn up and shook her. “È tempo di Lillake!”
The forever girl was surprised to feel a quickening of the creature’s pulse and a quiver develop in her limbs.
“It is not my job to do this, Lillake,” Mr. Jay said. He was standing about forty feet away at the edge of the large woven platform. “I have resisted.” His voice was tinged with irony or sadness. “But in this case, you make the exception a pleasure.” He raised a hand.
Nursie bellowed, her teeth clashing in the air, and charged Mr. Jay, swinging Dawn like a hammer. The forever girl screamed as blood rushed to her head, as she swept toward the magician.
Mr. Jay spoke a word and Nursie screamed.
Suddenly Dawn was tumbling across the woven floor toward a dark opening in the fabric and a long drop into shadow. But then small hands were on her, warm hands and strong, caught her before she fell. They pulled her up. A pair of brown-haired boys stood there—identical to look upon—beside them was the little boy with the helmet and deadly hand she’d first seen at the hideout. But fear and tension made liars of their bravery—and their eyes kept returning to the scene.
Mr. Jay confronted Nursie—he held his walking stick high and it gave off a clean white flame that blinded the monster. She halted her charge to throw sharp claws up to hide her eyes.
In the clean new light Nursie was grotesque and pitiful despite her killing power. The veins pulsed under her thin and leprous skin, and the tumorous muscle slid underneath it like serpents.
“No Mago!” she bellowed, her voice weakening. “È tempo di Lillake.”
“It’s not your time,” the magician said, and the monster charged. “It’s over for all of us.”
He easily dodged her slashing jaws, stepping in to slap her forehead.
“Get out!” he commanded and the monster screamed.
Nursie suddenly glowed with a harsh hot inner light that etched the shape of her guts and bones. She took two steps back, but there was a harsh cracking sound as her burning spine and thighbones snapped. The power within her ignited—and Nursie burst into a pillar of flame.
Mr. Jay turned from it as the fire spread outward and started to consume the platform under them. It roared up the fabrics and burned toward the structure’s moorings on the walls—the monstrous fibers flashing to cinders.
Mr. Jay ran to Dawn. She jumped into his arms. Her heart shivered as he pulled her close, and then he laughed.
“No time for reunions,” he chuckled and kissed her cheek. He looked back at the burning webbing and bones and then he turned to the forever children. Without a word, they ran, scrambling and scurrying down the burning fibrous ladders and platforms and left the roaring fire to consume the monstrous evidence.
69 – Army of God
“Children of God!” Gabriel was perched atop a tortured pillar of granite. The army was hurrying forward, grouping in the grassy clearing at its base. “Remember that though death has taken you it has not claimed your souls for the Lord God has need of you. Though thy spirit be willing, thy flesh is weak—yet, there is a great strength you should gain from the Lord’s choice of thee. Remember the words of God to Samuel. When in his judgment he did not choose the mighty Eliab, son of Jesse to be King of Israel—‘do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have refused him.’
“For the Lord does not see as a man sees; man looks at outward beauty, but the Lord looks at the heart. Just so. Do not look at your own state and say: Why would my God choose me to stand in his army? I am dead. How can my dead hands do for him what the living would find difficult?” Gabriel spread his wings slightly, folded them. Updike noticed his shield-bearer do the same. “The Lord your God has chosen you—not for the strength of your arms, but for the strength of your faith.”
Updike watched the Angels. The creatures radiated power. When he first arrived, Gabriel had looked at him. A smile leapt across his beautiful face. Updike felt warmth—the pain in his head buzzed and went mute with the smile, before returning with a vengeance, leaving him with the incongruous afterimage of the word “eavesdropper” in his memory. The Angel greeted Stoneworthy with a similar smile.
Was this the Angel he had listened to for so long? The Angel’s grand appearance attested to Updike’s sanity. All those years of doubt washed away. He was not crazy at all. Angels were real. He had been called to do the Lord’s work. The last nagging doubts began to leave him. The Army of the Dead was without fault, moving decisively for God.
“As Commander of the Army of God,” Gabriel continued, “it is my duty to lead you into battle. The skirmish you have just survived was a test of your faith and your strength. Where this army goes shall test it further still. For the Devil commands the Defenders of the City, and they are prepared to bring about Hellish calamity for you—destruction awaits at the hands of Infernal powers.
“But the Lord h
as foreseen this, and sent me to ward over you in the coming battle. Only the power of God can deflect the dark forces that are set against you, and I have great knowledge in that way. Fear not. The Lord has sent you a legion of his Angels. They do not come among you now, so great and awesome is their power that to witness it would incapacitate.
“They shall watch and ward you from the skies, and at the crucial moment, join you in battle!” A great cheer rose up from the Army. Updike’s spirits climbed. The pain in his face and head were unwelcome memories in Gabriel’s company. With a legion of Angels to help make war on the City, their cause could not fail!
A flutter of the Angel’s wings silenced the gathering. Gabriel surveyed the cheering army. His expression was unreadable as he continued:
“And yet, the battle shall test us all. For the journey to salvation is a long and arduous one. The Defenders of the City, who hoard wealth as they do life, will be hard-pressed to give it up. It is all they have, for their faith left them with the Change. So covetous are they with it that they have cavorted with the Infernal forces of Lucifer. They have fornicated with Demons. The City must Fall!” Updike looked over to Able Stoneworthy. The minister’s dead features dropped and then rose glimmering with internal righteousness and vigor.
The struggle was plain. For the City to fall—his Tower must fall. Stoneworthy had spent a century building it and creating its deeper mandate. Yet Updike saw the disappointment wash from the minister’s face, replaced by Divine purpose. Truly, Stoneworthy possessed enormous capacities for faith and sacrifice. Updike—weakened by his prolonged exposure to pain—had come to hesitate and question his own. To see the minister’s face as a determined bulwark of Divine inspiration encouraged him and set his own passion for service aflame.
The Archangel said, “You do this because you are in service to the Lord your God, and he commands it! You do this because God’s will is truth. It is the word in action, the word in form. And yet, we are God’s children. We are his beloved. He sacrificed his son for your sins, and now he asks you to sacrifice yourselves for him. But there is more!
The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two Page 37